Rolph Gobits

Vaudeville

Meeting Rolph Gobits was a bit like discovering a lost treasure. Although he has an international reputation for his travel photography, landscapes, and advertising work, his photographs of travelling entertainers have yet to be exhibited. I was allowed a peek at a selection of extraordinary images of mainly black-and-white prints of former dancers, tightrope walkers, lasso artists, and ventriloquists. In many cases, the performers seemed to know the perfect pose and seemed to relish the opportunity to captivate a new, albeit invisible audience.

Despite the proud poses, Gobits’ images are often quite melancholic and wistful. Gobit thought that this was probably because most of these accomplished stage performers no longer earning their livings as performers, having been made redundant by television, which gradually began to appear in British homes in the 1950s. Gobits began to realise that no one wanted to go to the Hippodrome to see live vaudeville anymore, so, in 1971 he became interested in photographing these remarkable people. “I went to a children’s party and my friends had booked a vaudeville entertainer. I started to talk to him — it might have been Verdini [SW: who projects duck-shaped hand shadows on the wall]”. Since that time, Gobits has spent over 30 years photographing these nearly forgotten performers.

As a child Gobits used to go to the Tuschinski, Amsterdam’s wonderful art deco movie theatre. Before the main feature, a live performer would come out on stage to entertain the audience by walking the trapeze, do some card tricks or some fancy juggling. These magical encounters had a huge impact on Gobits and he became fascinated with photography at an early age.
 “I bought my first camera”, he remembers, “when I was nine – a Yashica”. With his new acquisition, he would go off to nearby Schiphol airport to find out whether his camera was really capable of capturing an image at 1000th of a second by trying to freeze the spinning propeller blades of an aeroplane. I wondered whether his parents encouraged his interest in photography. He noted that they weren’t particularly artistic but they didn’t discourage his enthusiasm for photography either. In any case, they were much more preoccupied with other things, such as working for the Dutch Underground during the Second World War.
It was only after he moved to Britain to study at the Royal College of Arts in London, Gobits pointed out, that he really “learnt how to look”. After he graduated he worked for Nova magazine and worked on many commercial assignments but always ended up returning to photographing the travelling entertainers.

Many of his subjects were (and remain) very poor, but Gobits didn’t mind the shabby Wilton carpets and the cramped bed sitting rooms of these elderly performers. He has always preferred to photograph his Vaudeville performers in their homes or somewhere nearby. The only exception being the image shot inside a small circus tent which a performer had made from striped canvas windbreaks stolen from a local beach. It seems that this performer had his heart set on establishing his own two-man circus but couldn’t afford to buy any cloth.
On the whole, however, Gobits enjoys “taking people out of their usual context”, by which he means a theatrical setting. He initially found it difficult to invite himself into people’s homes, especially some of the older women who lived alone. He relied on word-of-mouth to gain access to these forgotten stars and even managed to photograph The Vernon Sisters who lived in Potters Bar. This enigmatic shot features them wearing voluminous frilly cancan skirts which they lift up, revealing their lacy knickers. He’s not sure they’re still alive but Gobits feels that he’s capturing a disappearing world or what he describes as “a forgotten tribe”.

His collection of portraits include some very surreal scenes such as the photo of the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec impersonator, which has the air of a curious 19th- century relic. He is portrayed here kneeling down with his shoes tied to his knees to make him seem even smaller. Some of Gobits’ portraits are quite sad, such as the one of the clown holding onto a Zimmer frame next to his bed in a nursing home. Other evocative photos were taken in a caravan park. Here, through a window we see an elderly juggler spinning plates while watching his favourite soap opera. The conspicuous absence of an audience is what makes these shots particularly poignant and affecting.
“Obviously it’s the oldest people I want to get first”, Gobits emphasises. He is determined to meet these talented people before they quietly pass away. But it should be emphasised that not everyone in these photographs is in their seventies and eighties. One particularly striking image is the one of an escape artist tied up on her living room floor. This young woman is being studiously ignored by the man in a cardigan sitting in the corner who he seems more interested in the television than in watching her escape. The incongruity of a bound woman in a suburban semitrailer gives this photograph a mischievous and engaging air. Gobits doesn’t mind teasing the viewer, and with some of his images you get the feeling you are actually watching a live performance. His approach is a combination of complex and simple, which mixes the theatrical with the everyday.

These images could be perceived as the (imaginary) result of what would happen if Angela Carter and Harold Pinter wrote a play together: with fantasy roles being played out in very ordinary spaces with no audience on hand to witness the extraordinary feats of these venerable performers. In Ropespinner, we notice that the woman in chains is gazing back at us, which gives us the feeling that Gobits has reversed our roles. We become self-conscious as viewers of people who are no longer being viewed and that we are partly at fault. This sense of loss is emphasised by the fact that many of his characters wear costumes that are endearingly and shabbily out of date. For instance, the elderly dancer, Terry Dougan, is dressed in ill-fitting tights and shoes, with no one left to applaud her.

Gobits’ photographs have the ability to capture an entire dramatic performance in one shot. For instance, take the photo of the woman striking the operatic pose as the Devil and Virgin, which is all the more astonishing because this double act is actually performed by woman in a virginal white evening dress holding a fiendish mask and black cloak. She has the tragic demeanour of Maria Callas, which suggests that Gobits manages to capture ancient myths still being acted out in mundane living rooms. He never ridicules or mocks these heroines, acrobats, and illusionists. Instead, he prefers to capture the last vestiges of this dying profession. These outstanding images make all the participants seem dignified despite their bedraggled costumes. Gobits honours everyone he photographs and it is rare to see contemporary images portray such extraordinary integrity and enchantment. Like a young child mesmerised by a conjuror at the circus, we want to ask; “how did he do that?”

Text by Siobhan Wall
©picture: Rolph Gobits

John Waters

John Waters, Baltimore’s “Pope of Trash” and the filmmaker behind cult classics like Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, makes more than movies. His contemporary art, a collection of montage photography, sculpture, and self-portraiture, is as bizarrely humorous and intelligent as his films. Rear Projection, his latest exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, is a bawdy feast of good-natured parody. In what follows, Waters explains how bad film stills make great art, why contemporary art hates people, and what it’s like to pose as the Provincetown Town Crier.

Clayton Maxwell: On the Gagosian website, you are quoted as saying, “There is no such thing as a bad movie frame. It can be a terrible movie but in the art world it can be seen in a totally different way.” Could you explain this?

John Waters: When you go to see a movie in the theatre you are thinking of the whole movie, the plot, and the performances throughout. If you are seeing it in the art world, as I am especially, and it doesn’t work in the movie world, you can take a still, which is basically 1/24th of a second, and think of it as a still to be printed. So you can look at whatever your want—the lamps or the rugs. Or take that image and edit it in with one from another movie and that turns the whole narrative around. And sometimes it’s the opposite of what it was saying in the original movie. I am really writing with these images what I notice in a movie. With two of the pieces in this series, The Penmark Collection and The Rope Collection, basically I am sneaking into a movie like an art thief, when none of the characters, the writer, the directors, the crew, when no one is looking, and taking the art off of the wall and taking it back to my home and then putting it into a gallery. That art has nothing to do with the plot. You are not supposed to notice it. No one talks about it. It is never featured for long on the screen. Therefore, to me it is the most important thing when I am watching the movie with an artistic eye.

CM: So it can be a pretty bad movie, but because you are free to do whatever you want with the stills, you can transform it.

JW: I love bad movies sometimes. Bad, what does that mean? Sometimes I think movies that win the Oscars are bad. Bad is an opinion. What I’m saying is, you can take any movie, one you love or hate, and subvert the original meaning of that movie by putting it up with another movie or putting it in a different order or editing out the details. Like a failed publicist for a movie who would be fired the first day—because the stills that I take are ones that would get no one to see the movie. They might get them to buy it and take it home from an art gallery. But that’s not what a publicist is supposed to do. And I am always convinced that nobody remembers movies, they remember the stills that made the movies famous.

So in that way I am trying to subvert all the insider knowledge about show business, but in a joyous way. Because I always make fun of things I love. I never parody the things I hate.

CM: Yes, and that’s what makes it more appealing to me as a viewer because it doesn’t come off as mean-spirited.

JW: No, it isn’t mean spirited, not at all. Even the Smile Train people called me. (Smile Train is the world’s largest cleft surgery charity.) I explained to them I parodied them because I love them. To me they are stars, too. Edith Massey could have been in the Smile Train. I could have switched stars.

CM: How did you come up with the Smile Train idea?

JW: Well, I get the ad in the mail everyday almost. And there are billboards of those children. They are as big as Jerry’s Kids ever were.

In the charity world there are stars, also. If I saw one of those children on the street I would recognise them I think because I’ve seen them so often. They are promoted. And I am not saying that’s wrong, I’m sure that charity does a great job. But at the same time, there are stars in every world and when I put them together I hope I am commenting that they are the same in a weird way.

CM: Yes, those Smile Train images really stick in your head.

JW: Yes, they do.  Like did you see the new woman today who got a new face and they showed this great improvement? It was staggering to me. They showed the before-and-after. Have you seen those pictures?

CM: No, I haven’t.

JW: Oh, look on-line. The woman who got a face-plant. You can never top what comes in the next day’s news.

CM: And I love how you do highlight that they, the Smile Train kids, are celebrities, too. It helps to rethink my ideas of celebrity.

JW: Every business has their celebrity. Every movement has to have a star, has to have somebody that sells it, that makes people be interested in it.

CM: One of my personal favourites in this series is the Town Crier. I read that it was an embarrassing experience for you.

JW: Let me tell you something. I live in Provincetown. Every summer there is a town crier. I remember they had one town crier who children ran from he was so scary. They’ve had a drunk, one who was a pervert…they’ve had a gay one. And the one they have now is lovely, and he’s good at it—he’s involved in the Broadway world, he’s an actor. And I see his joy every day in doing it. A long time ago I saw the scary town crier in the cleaner picking up his outfit and his regular clothes with the plastic over it and something made me crazy about that. So I was really thinking about what it would be like to be the town crier. So I just went over to the town crier’s house and asked him if I could borrow the outfit. It was so humiliating, but he was very lovely and very kind. The outfit is one size fits all, you’d be surprised, except for the tights I had to buy and I think the buckles on the shoes. And then for me, to do this in Provincetown, where generally I’m really well known because I’ve been there for so many years, but I’m always on my bicycle so no one can really stop me. By the time they say, “Hey, that’s John Waters” I’m already down the street… Well, to actually walk downtown at the height of the season and be dressed as the town crier was something really frightening for me to do. I got dressed in my apartment and looked in the mirror and said, “Am I actually going to walk out of the house like this?”

The real town crier wears the outfit with great authority and I wear it with great mortification. Because every day I’m dressed as John Waters and he’s dressed as the town crier, and in a weird way we have the same job because a lot of people know who I am and a lot of people know who he is. But maybe it would have been better if he had dressed as me at the same time. That’s what we should have done.

But I thought, “Well, I have to do it.” I have my art gallery in Provincetown, the Merola, and Jim, the part owner, picked me up in his van across the street. But I still had to walk across my yard and then I saw my landlady gardening, and she just looked up and the expression on her face— it said, “What in the hell could you possibly be doing?” It was a great moment because she was totally bewildered. That was the only person I made eye contact with when I had it on. So we went downtown. We had it all set up for the shoot. I jumped out of the van, took the shot then jumped back in. I couldn’t make eye contact with anyone in that outfit. It was a new exercise in humiliation for me; it was an S and M experience.

CM: That’s crazy that you should be so embarrassed. You are John Waters—aren’t you used to dressing up?

JW: But not as the town crier, though, not in a pilgrim outfit. I can dress like me everyday. But I can’t get dressed like the town crier. It’s just a different kind of drag. And I love the town crier. And he loves doing it. And he doesn’t look silly in it. But that’s a whole different thing. He wears it with confidence. I wore it like bondage.

CM: And is that a good experience?

JW: I did it once. I don’t think I’d ever have the urge to do it again. Although now the town-crier is my friend, and whenever I have parties he’s there and people ask, “Why is the town crier at your parties?” Because I didn’t really know him before.

CM: Tell me about two of my other favourites pieces, the sculptures of the bottle of Rush and the La Mer face cream.

JW: I can tell you about some of the great reactions I’ve gotten. I was giving my lecture at the 92nd street Y with Rob Storr, showing slides of my work. And just coincidentally in the audience were three of the women who run the La Mer company. They were stupefied when they saw it. So they came to the opening and brought me a $1000 bottle of La Mer. And the foundation bought the piece, which I loved.

And then I got a letter from the man who runs the company who owns Rush—and I always get paranoid at first that someone’s going to be mad—but he told me that he loved it and that he was sending me a lifetime supply of Rush. It looks great in the box. So many bottles. It’s so Warholian.  Now every time I do Rush I need more La Mer, so I’m really set for life. The Smile Train called but they didn’t send me a facelift.

CM: It’s funny because I heard you once say that companies would not want any of their products in your movies.

JW: No, they’d threaten to sue.

CM: But now it’s reverse.

JW: It is a little reverse in the art world. I always said that the art world and the movie world are opposite in a way. In the movie world we have to pretend that every person in the world has to love the movie. And in the art world if everyone loved it, it would really be terrible. You just need one person to love it. Mostly it's completely the opposite. But I’m still dealing with humour and still dealing with the movie business in some way.

I use La Mer crème. It’s one of the few luxuries I really do give myself and used to feel guilty about, but not anymore. And I do use poppers, but not as much as I pretend. Am I making fun of them? I’m making fun of myself for loving buying them. But yes, I like those products.

CM: Are they as great as they claim to be?

JW: La Mer is. You put it on a burn, and it completely heals it. I must admit every time I buy it I think, “Now does this really work?” And then I think, “Well, how ugly would you be if you didn’t use it?” And Rush is the poor man’s Viagra. And on Viagra labels it says to never use poppers at the same time, but I have friends who say, sure you can. It’s a low rent high. But if it's a high that only lasts three minutes, how bad can it be? I’ve never heard of anyone having a bad popper trip.

CM: Moving on. In the montage Hetero Flower Shop, are you saying that no gay man would make arrangements that awful?

JW: No. I am asking the question, “Can a hetero man be a good florist?” And the results speak for themselves. I was trying to imagine, if there were a florist that was sexist and only hired straight men, what would the flowers look like? And then I recreated those flower arrangements, inspired from real advertisements. But those are the kind of flowers that most people want to get in Middle America. If I got them I’d be furious. I’d call the person who sent them and say, “Look, I really thank you for sending me flowers, but I’ve got to tell you to change florists.” I got the idea because of a friend who was trying to get a new florist. She called the florist and said to the guy on the phone, "Is there a gay man there?" And he said, “Yeah, I’ve got a couple in the back. And she said, “Well, let me talk to them.” She told me, “You know, I don’t want a straight man doing my flowers.” Is that acceptable sexism? Is it a hate crime to ask if your florist is heterosexual? I’m trying to really analyse the situation for its sexual politics.

CM: Can you tell me about the process of putting together a montage like Rear Projection? ["Rear projection" is a movie term for the process in which a studio-filmed foreground action is combined with a previously shot background scene to give the impression the actors are on location.]

JW: I found each rear projection shot. Matt, my assistant, looked at hundreds of ass pornos, and then we took the pictures of them and isolated them and zoomed in and took them out of different frames. Then Brian Gossman, who does all my photo retouching, he put them in. I conceptualised it. I’m directing and editing it. It’s all about editing. It’s hardly about photography. I use photography. But it’s not about photography. That’s the least of what it’s about.

CM: Are you ever surprised with what you discover through the process? Does it ever turn out to be very different from what you've expected?

JW: Oh yes, completely. It’s impossible to get the right picture sometimes. You are running the video and just snapping in the dark with a hand held camera. Many times I leave in mistakes, which all contemporary artists do. Yes, you are always surprised when you get the film back, when something that you thought would really work didn’t. You might have an idea and you shoot all the photos and then when you put them together it just doesn’t work. But you just have to do it. But it is all thought up in the very beginning and what ends up is a variation of that original idea.

CM: How is it satisfying to you in a way that filmmaking isn’t?

JW: They are both satisfying in that they are both creative work. I don’t compare them; I don’t do them in the same place. I keep them very separate. Even though they both have humour. If you mean “satisfying” in terms of success, well, in the movie business I guess it would be how much the movie grosses, and in the art world it would be a sold out show. But the real thing you hope for in the movie business is a rave review from a critic you respect and the same thing in the art world. But both never really happen the way you want, in the same way they don’t make anything better. I learned a long time ago, with reviews you read the good ones twice and the bad ones once and then you put them away and never look at them again. But I do read them. I don’t believe anybody who says they don’t read them. But a lot of times in the artwork you do, the failure is better. Where in filmmaking, that doesn’t work. Well I guess you can have the failure of technique, but I just didn’t know any better. And the people who liked it would call it “raw” or “primitive” but that just meant “bad.” The same way in the art world when people use the word “rigorous.” It just means that other people can’t understand it.

I always thought movies are for the people and art is not for the people. Whenever they try to make art for the people it is a terrible idea.

CM: And that’s the inspiration for the piece Contemporary Art Hates You.

JW: It does hate some people. It hates the people who have contempt without investigation. People who say, “Aw, my kid could do that, that’s the most ridiculous thing.” It does hate them and it should hate them. And yes, those who do follow contemporary art and must learn the secret way to look at things, well, they're happy it hates those people. Because those people are too stupid to look.

CM: So contemporary art is not meant for widespread audiences.

JW: It could be if everyone would open up their mind enough and study enough and see enough so that they learn to see. Or learn to understand it. Or learn to be outraged by it. Which is what contemporary art is supposed to do in the first place—it’s suppose to wreck things, it’s suppose to destroy what came before. It’s suppose to alter what you think is good, I think. But unless you accept that and look for that or find delight or some kind of intellectual stimulation, it does hate you because you are stupid. And I don’t hate all stupid people, but I hate militantly stupid people.

TEXT BY CLAYTON MAXWELL
©picture John Waters
Detail from Hollywood Smile Train 2009, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Dimitris Yeros

Shades of Love

My life is spent in the ebb and flow of pleasure, in erotic fantasies—sometimes realized.
My work leans toward thought.
Perhaps rightly so.
Then my work is like the amphora I mentioned. It allows for different interpretations.
And my love life has its own manifestation—obscure only to the ignorant. Expressed more broadly, it may not have been enough of an artistic field for me to stay, to be enough for me.
I work like the ancients. They wrote history, they created philosophy, dramas of a mythological tragic nature—sensual—so many of them—just like me.—C.P. CAVAFY

It is no surprise that Cavafy’s poetry would inspire a fellow Greek Greek photographer Dimitris Yeros. Cafavy’s life is rich in material: he was a gay poet at the turn of the 19th century who bucked norms and openly embraced his sexuality. Well-read and well travelled, he was both an aristocrat and polymath; he lived in Alexandria, England, Constantinople, and France, but spent the majority of his life in Alexandria. His poetry, however, was written in Greek; Yeros commissioned a new translation by David Connolly especially for this project. (Playwright Edward Albee writes the forward, and photography critic John Wood the introduction.) An amalgam of visual arts and literature that is both handsome and invitingly naughty, Shades of Love has attracted the attention of both poetry and photography lovers worldwide.

Yeros transforms this project into a particularly enlivening journey by pairing Cavafy’s poems with portraits of the world’s top men of arts and letters (with one Greek-American actress—Olympia Dukakis—as the exception.) Gore Vidal, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, David Leddick, Duane Michals, Jeff Koons, Naguib Mahfouz, Jean Baudrillard, and many more fill the pages of the book. This addition makes Shades of Love far more than just a coupling of poetry and photography: Yeros is taking the particular—one man’s poems—and highlighting their universal reach by bringing in new personalities to embody them. Shades of Love is a visual testament to these words that Cavafy wrote a hundred years ago: “I work like the ancients. They wrote history, they created philosophy, dramas of a mythological tragic nature—sensual—so many of them—just like me.” Just as Cavafy is like the ancients, so are Yeros and the colleagues he photographs.

But these famous men do not occupy the photos alone. They are flanked by hunky, naked youth—male models—who serve as a fascinating foil to the dignified older men in the photos. Yeros transforms what could have been a straight up portrait into visual dialogues about relationship and all of the complexities they can contain—yearning, nostalgia, lust, envy, love, etc—exactly what Cafavy explores through poetry.

Yeros is friends with most of the famous men he photographs, which partially explains the intimacy, humour and warmth his images possess—in some of them, you feel like you are getting an inside glimpse into the creative private world of close friends. The already-established relationship translates to a surprising ease in the images.

Shades of Love emphasizes Cavafy’s unusual outspokenness as a gay man. During the time he was writing, homosexuality was emphatically “thought shameful even to mention.” Which is another reason why Cavafy’s poetry is so unusual—he was speaking out in much bolder terms about his sexuality than any of his contemporaries, including Walt Whitman.

Shades of Love feels like a journey not only into Cavafy’s poetry, but also into the richness of Yeros’ world. In the afterward of the book, Yeros writes amusing anecdotes from the often complicated and bold photo shoots that went into its making. He tells how William Weslow, naked, would repeatedly interrupt the photo shoot to chase away the pigeons from his veranda, furiously waving his arms. And how Clive Barker refused to be shot naked because he didn’t want his penis to look smaller next to that of his partner. The very tales behind these images contain all of the drama, vanity, warmth and allure of a really good poem.                                                                           

But what about the beefcakes? What role do they play other than eye candy? Actually, given the tone of Cavafy’s poetry—that is probably the exact role they are supposed to play. So many of Cavafy’s poems focus on youthful beauty, placing their gaze on those hotties of the firm round buttocks and sculpted pecs, evocations of the Greek Ideal. In one photo, a young man stands amidst crumbling antiquities. His bottom faces us, as perfectly shaped as a marble statue of Eros. Yeros (whose name, I must note, is simply Eros with a Y) is deliberately playing with Greece’s history as centre of both the ideal human form and gay love since antiquity.

Cavafy’s poems drip with nostalgia and sexual longing. Many possess the voice of an older man whose memories of all consuming passion both feed and haunt him. Yeros’ images visually reinforce this lust for youth and beauty.

TEXT BY CLAYTON MAXWELL
image: Duane Michals and Douglas, New York, 2001,©Dimitris Yeros

Isaac Julien

'Looking for Langston' was made in 1989 when Julien was a member of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective. Written and directed by Julien, the 16mm film is subtitled ‘a meditation on’, rather than a documentary about, the poet Langston Hughes. A literary icon and leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hughes championed black culture through his poems, critical commentary, novels and plays. But despite his acknowledged achievements and his fame, and his tributes to working people and the oppressed, he was unable openly to fight for the gay community; his sexuality remains ambiguous.
Both the film and the series of still images featured in the exhibition, present a world of uncontested beauty. Julien’s emphasis on lush visuality is embedded in his practice, and central to his examination of histories and communities that are socially, politically and geographically outside of the dominant ideological structures. For Julien, making work is always about challenging and rewriting the rules of representation. Langston Hughes shared a similar drive to rework prevailing notions of racial and social identity. According to critic Donald B. Gibson, “During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read . . . Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.”
As the narrative unfolds, the camera fluidly moves across different spaces, venturing through different historical eras, blending past and present, splicing historical document with imagination. In its poetic structure, the film also incorporates music, voice-over, poetry, and dramatic tableaux. The film begins with Hughes’ fictionalised funeral: mourners cluster around an open coffin as a woman’s voice (the artist recorded Toni Morrison speaking at James Baldwin’s memorial) eulogises the deceased. The man in the coffin (Hughes) is none other than Julien, which underlines the film’s personal nature and suggests the theme of historical identification.
In this work of radiant imagery and complex interweavings, the story journeys beyond death, beyond the funerary images reminiscent of Van Der Zee’s Harlem Book of the Dead, arriving in its principal setting, a nightclub - a glisteningly rich world of textured contrasts and silver tones. An otherworldly Cotton Club, perhaps, where angelic creatures preside, beautiful black-skinned young men in evening suits. Smoking. Dancing. Exchanging glances. A game of giving and receiving looks where the gaze of the film’s sole white protagonist carries a layered dynamic – desire, the eroticised look directed at the fetishized ‘other’. And yet the ‘looking’ of the title is about more than simply the eroticized look directed at the object of desire, it also implies the artist’s search to connect with the past – with a moment in history – a psychic, social space – with a particular figure.
The sequence of stills exists independently of the film. The compositions are staged pictures related to the film, rather than taken from it. Like the moving images, the stills are laden with associations; their smoky sculpturality, tonality and composition hint at film noire. Touches of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Jean Cocteau. Robert Mapplethorpe. There is an almost palpable sense of joy and love lost; a sense that these images may be an ode to forbidden beauty, to lives and times past. And yet beneath the sumptuous pictorial surface lurks the spectre of AIDS, at its height in the late eighties, adding a terrible poignancy and yet another complex thread to images that, for Julien, act as ‘memorial sites’: at times offering glimpses of the creative process while at others exploring moments of a questionable history. Surrounded by these images, the viewer becomes drawn into the dreamscape, an onlooker caught between histories and narratives.

TEXT BY LISA HOLDEN

©picture Isaac Julien, Film Noir Staircase, Ilford classic silver gelatin fine art paper, mounted on aluminum and framed Framed size 74.5 x 58.1 cm, Edition of 4 plus 2 APs, 1989-2016, courtesy Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam

About the artist
Isaac Julien is a Turner prize nominated artist and filmmaker. Julien has pioneered a form of multi-screen installations, including light-boxes and photographic works. Julien is currently producing a new work that is a poetic meditation on aspects of the life and architecture of Lina Bo Bardi. The first chapter of this work, ''Stones Against Diamonds'', was shown during 2015's La Biennale di Venezia, Art Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach, and is now also on view alongside Looking for Langston at Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam. After teaching at Harvard University (1998-2002), Julien was Professor of Media Art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe (2009-2015) and Chair of Global Art at University of Arts London (2014-2016).

LOOKING FOR LANGSTON
Isaac Julien
Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam
25.11.2016 - 07.01.2017

Pawel Jaszczuk

Salaryman
    
In the early morning hours in Tokyo, a contingent of young men turns up in the thousands on subways, buses and thoroughfares. Judging by their similar dress code (suit, tie, and briefcase) they resemble humanoid worker ants. However, 12 to 14 hours later the same young men take on a different appearance. They frequent bars in Tokyo’s Shimbashi district, karaoke establishments in Shinjuku, and smoke non-stop, while drinking too much sake and shochu. Later, lying supine or on their sides, unconscious with their mouths agape, their bodies appear on steps and sidewalks, or draped over waiting-room benches like living rags. These are not the casualties of a sleeping sickness that plagues the general public but rather “darkly celebrated” victims of modern life in Japan. When their faces happen to reflect consciousness at all, their dazed, watery-eyed stares are highlighted by perspiration and dribble. Such details accentuate Pawel Jaszczuk’s Salaryman—a black-and-white series by the Polish-born photographer working in Tokyo. The mix of culture, tradition and social habits exhibited in Salaryman culminates in a perplexing combination of actions. Jaszczuk’s images inform, irritate and amuse at the same time.
 
While Salaryman documents, as it were, the down side of the Asian work ethic, which boldly demonstrates social habits and economic patterns unlike those of its Western counterpart, in a less distinct voice this photo-series addresses the fear of not earning enough money to finance the so-called good life. Fundamentally, this fear lies at the heart of these unusual portraits of young Japanese men in states of abandon. Over the past decades, the same fear has driven an entire generation of young men into the grip of 12-hour-long workdays in Japanese firms and agencies, as if they plan to become millionaires before reaching the ripe old age of 30. Added to their voluntary or imposed ambitiousness, and encouraged by peers and employers in many cases, comes the self-effacing habit of drinking too much.

The suggested stress on earning, destructively attached to alcohol consumption, constitutes only one aspect of Jaszczuk’s series, which he developed as an art project focused on an antihero of sorts, a character as controversial as legendary in Japanese society. Content-wise at least two other aspects surface in these images of workaholics enjoying their curiously condoned, alcohol-ridden after hours. On the one hand, the viewer recognises a vague if persistent connection to surreal literature (especially books with nightlife themes), and an estranging reference to film noir on the other.

Jaszczuk’s unflattering shots of inebriated men sleeping off their drinking binges on streets and in public places in Tokyo (after missing their trains and buses home and drinking too much despite their well-known low resistance to alcoholic) suggest an eerie reversal of Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, the novel about a surreal brothel where male customers spend their time with unconscious women who remain “in a deathlike sleep” throughout the visit. Also, by virtue of the subjects’ poses and general aspect, Jaszczuk’s “male sleeping beauties” photographed dead drunk on street corners, subway platforms and at bus stops, suggest Weegee’s crime scene photography. Most significantly, these images make chilling and, at times, comical, references to “karōshi” or “death by overworking”.

Immediately following World War II the word “salaryman” became synonymous with the Japanese white-collar businessman, the ideal middle-class citizen, and the respected social climber. At that time the term frequently appeared in texts related to Japanese culture. Today such positive associations have vanished, and “salaryman” refers to a type of corporate existence in which drawing a salary perpetuates the day-to-day slavery suffered by office employees who lack the means (and sometimes the imagination) to escape their redundant existence. This results in the character previously held in esteem becoming more so an object of controlled pity (if not contempt) nowadays. Though candid and editorial on the surface, Jaszczuk’s images of men nose-diving into drunkenness are buoyed on the kind of questioning akin to artworks and not socially critical photo-essays. Accordingly, the photographer insists that Salaryman is neither judgmental nor critical. “My photography,” says Jaszczuk, “creates questions and not answers.”

As a graphic design student at the School of Visual Arts in Sydney, Australia, Jaszczuk first discovered his love of camerawork while attending a weekly photography course, and became a professional photographer after finishing his studies. In Tokyo, for the sake of placing his theme-oriented art projects, he works with an agency as well. But he would never refer to himself as a photojournalist or reporter. He produces editorial-like artworks, and his deep fascination with photographing unique people drew him to the salaryman as ideal subject matter. There was hardly a more absorbing and chameleonic character to photograph. As Jaszczuk remarks, “Photographing the salaryman means shooting someone who presents himself one way in the morning and another way at night.” As socially critical statements go, this is a far cry from a young Polish artist, born 1978, commenting on a public issue.

During the making of Salaryman, Jaszczuk showed the utmost respect for the privacy of his various “models”. Also, no one that he spent time with was ever photographed asleep in public. He guarded the identity of the men who generously shared their family problems with him, relating issues that evolved from heavy drinking and ranged from husbands accused of neglect to couples filing for divorce. These modern-day cases, which reiterate the salaryman’s existence in Japan since the middle of the 1940s, underscore how the term has always been used to express the merging of a social creature with a social phenomenon, while using the unmistakable image of a man devastated by the after-effects of working long hours, or better, the persistent image of a “work ethic” man, in suit and tie, striking the twisted pose of a fallen worker.
 
Jaszczuk, who claims to have neither judged the salaryman nor felt particularly inspired by other photographers as he worked, employs a decidedly present-day style for his series, and it functions without referencing any known schools of Japanese contemporary photography. Instead, while consciously ignoring Japan’s versatile world of fashion photography and the likes of Eikoh Hosoe’s poignant aesthetics, Jaszczuk’s series seems to hint at the troubling insights of Diane Arbus and the contortions of the models that appear in Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities series. If nothing else, the questions and suggestions brought to life in Salaryman speak for the breadth of Jaszczuk’s simple but enormously powerful photographs.    

TEXT BY KARL E. JOHNSON

©image by Pawel Jaszczuk

Brian D. Miller

Sarah was her name and that was the only thing I really knew about her. She drifted in and out of my life after a violent encounter with a dangerous man. She shot him for what he tried to do and I had no problem with that. He did not have a name but she wanted me to act as if I were him, to speak like him, to move like him. She made me do this if I wanted to know what really happened. I made myself feel rage at all times, to suffer a mixture of aggression and powerlessness. I came to grips with a constant dull hatred and used my fists to get what I wanted. In my sleep I ground my teeth in frustration. I took advantage of weakness in others. What little light there ever was, is still here now.

I found her standing by the side of a road in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where I lived. I saw her as I was driving by and pulled over to see if she needed help. At first she ignored me, and acted as if I wasn’t there. I repeatedly asked if she needed help but she just stared into the forest. Eventually she looked in my direction, made eye contact and without saying a word got into my truck. I got into the drivers seat and asked where she needed to go. Again she said nothing. I asked if she lived around here, knowing that there were no houses for several miles in either direction. She did not respond. I asked if she wanted a ride home but she still would not speak. I asked if she needed to go to the hospital and with this question she again looked into my eyes. But still she stayed silent. Finally out of desperation I asked if she wanted to go to a bar and she said yes.

She said that if I gave her a place to stay that I could photograph her any way I wanted. I told her to be careful about that kind of offer and she said that there wasn’t anything that I could think of that she would not want to do.

She never left my house. I would leave for work in the morning. She would stay in bed. I don’t know when she got up. By the time I got home from work she was usually occupying herself, playing with my dog or reading one of my books. She never left the house or even made a phone call. As far as I know she had no contact with the outside world while she stayed with me.

I made the mistake of telling her that some of my plates used to belong to my former girlfriend, Pearl. When I got home from work that night she broke half of them. She said that only half were actually mine.

One night after dinner she told me that she had to leave. I knew that this was coming and that there was nothing I could do to change her mind.  But she did not need to leave that night. She had been with me for three weeks. Three days later I drove her to the spot on route 25C, where I found her. We didn’t talk much on the drive. I asked her where she would go and what she would do. She said she didn’t know but that she would manage. I helped her with her bag and kissed her goodbye. She said she loved me. As I drove away I looked back. She was walking down a dirt road into the woods. The next day I went back, I had to know what happened to her. But there was nothing to suggest that she had ever been there, not even a footprint. I walked back into the woods for about a mile but it became too swampy to continue. I never saw her again.

She smelled like the forest after rain, with a faint hint of something floral. She told me what it was but I can’t remember any more. There is so much I have forgotten. She had a lipstick called “Trailer Trash”. I made her put it on for the pictures. She also had a loose dress that looked more like a slip. She wore it most of the time.

I woke up in the middle of the night about two weeks after she left. I thought I heard her voice saying something. I got up and looked around in the house but she wasn’t there. But it smelled like she had just left, I could smell her in every room.

When I photographed her I became obsessed or even possessed. I didn’t care about her or even myself, I was only concerned with the pictures. I would have done anything I had to. I was cruel at times and I don’t know why she stayed with me. She never complained, even when she was cold or tired or angry. Other times she would try to do things I could not photograph, things which could not or maybe should not be remembered. She said we were like crows, living off dead things and if we stayed together we would both rot.

Her eyes were grey. When she was cold they were a watery blue. Her lips had no colour and so she always wore lipstick. Her hair was dirty blond and messy. Her hands were always cold. Her fingernails also had no colour but were very clean. Her voice was low but she spoke loudly. There was never any doubt in her words.

TEXT BY BRIAN D. MILLER

©picture Brian D. Miller

Samuel Fosso

Born in Kumba in Cameroon and based in Bangui in the Central African Republic, Fosso is one Africa's most eminent photographers. A year after his work was discovered at the first edition of the Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine photography festival in Mali in 1994, he won the Afrique en création prize. His work has been compared to that of Cindy Sherman. Indeed, when Fosso, 46, discovered Sherman’s work in 1996 at Les Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, he was surprised by the similarities in their staged self-portraiture that rely on the photographer being both an actor and a director.
Formally, his work has been compared to that of the great Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. Fosso even chose to reinvent himself as Keita for one of the self-portraits in his African Spirits series.

Fosso invested a significant amount of research into the realisation of each carefully staged image in African Spirits. Every one of them is based on a photograph that Fosso has faithfully reinterpreted in order to assume a different identity. This has involved everything from the backdrop, hired costumes, make-up and hair-styling to Fosso practising each character’s facial expressions.

We see Fosso as Martin Luther King making an impassioned speech and in a mug shot image taken after King’s arrest in 1956, his prisoner’s plaque with the number 7089 hanging round his neck. Fosso also presents himself as Malcolm X, Miles “Dewey” Davis, and as Angela Davis, the American political activist and university professor who is the only woman that Fosso portrays in this series.

For another image, Fosso restaged the Esquire 1968 cover of Muhammad Ali in which Ali appears impaled by six arrows, martyred as St. Sebastian, a patron saint of athletes. (It alluded to his refusal to be conscripted into the US army to fight in the Vietnam War because of his Muslim beliefs. Consequently, Ali was stripped of the World Title and had his boxing license revoked.) Fosso also poses as Tommie Smith raising his fist into the air after receiving his medal for winning the 200-metre sprint in the 1968 Olympics.

Other images pay homage to important, 20th century African leaders. We see
Fosso as Nelson Mandela wearing white African robes, a beaded, tribal collar and arm bracelet; the photograph was released by the African National Congress in the 1960s.

Fosso also honours Aimé Césaire, the poet, dramatist, statesman and former deputy of Martinique in the French National Assembly, and Léopold Senghor, the former President of Senegal. They were both principal founders of the concept of negritude—the awareness of the cultural and historical consequences of being African, or of having African descent, in a then white-dominated world.

Equally, Fosso imagines himself as Patrice Emery Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. Lumumba was the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo after he helped win its independence from Belgium in June 1960; his government was deposed in a coup during the Congo Crisis, and Lumumba was imprisoned and murdered. Similarly, Nkrumah, the first head of an independent Ghana who led his country to independence in 1957, was overthrown in a coup nine years later and died in exile.
The other African leader Fosso role-plays is Haile Selassie, Ethiopia's last emperor and one of the founding fathers of the Organisation of African Unity. He is regarded by many as the figurehead of African independence for his defiance against the Italian colonial invasion in the 1930s.

Anna Sansom: What was your childhood in Cameroon and then Nigeria like?

Samuel Fosso: I was born in Cameroon in 1962. But I had a paralysing illness, and was paralysed in the arms and the legs. So when I was three, my mother took me to the south-eastern part of Nigeria, in Biafra, to be healed; that’s where her parents, brothers and sisters all lived. My grandfather was both village chief and healer. After I was healed, I continued living with my grandparents and in the meantime my mother died. Then the Biafra War broke out and we didn’t have any means to survive. One of my uncles, who had escaped and opened a small footwear factory in Bangui, came to get me in 1972 and I worked in his factory.

AS: How did you come to open your first photography studio when you were 13?

SF: I walked past by a studio owed by a Nigerian—at that time, there were only two photographers in Bangui: one from Cameroon and then this man. My uncle’s wife convinced my uncle to let me work for the Nigerian photographer as an apprentice. Then I opened my first studio, the Studio Photo National, on 14 September 1975, using 6 x 8 films. People came to do family photos, photos with friends, National Holidays, New Years… For me, taking photos for clients was utopian because I was in my own studio.

AS: I read that you started making self-portraits because you wanted to send them to your grandmother.

SF: Yes, when I started taking photographs, I took the opportunity to make self-portraits that I could send to her, to reassure her that there were no problems and that everything was going well for me. At night, I used the scraps of leftover film to take my self-portraits. I used American magazines, especially photos of black musicians like James Brown. To create the outfits, I bought fabrics and took them to a tailor. I showed him the pictures in the magazines so he could make me clothes that I could wear for my self-portraits. That’s how I started. I would also design the décor.

AS: You were also interested in politics?

SF: I was always alone, and I listened to the radio and watched television, and followed the politicians and history. And I realised that it was because of the rich people and the politicians that I suffered during my childhood with the Biafra War. That’s what made me want to look into who was good and who was bad. And when I became an artist in 1994, I thought it was important to communicate what I thought about this.

AS: How was your work discovered?

SF: I was discovered in 1993 by a Frenchman called Bernard Descamps, who was looking for photographs for Afrique en création to present at the first edition of Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine [“Meetings of African Photography”] in Bamako, Mali. So he was curious about meeting African photographers. Somebody I know heard about this and brought him to meet me in my studio. I showed him my colour pictures but he wanted the older photos from the 70s and 80s that I had kept. Whenever I would make my self-portraits back then, I would send one picture to my grandmother and keep one for myself so that if I ever got married one day I could show them to my children.
Bernard took my work away in his suitcase and the next year I was invited to participate in the exhibition in Bamako. The president of the Republic of Mali came. I was very happy and honoured. He asked if I sold my photos, but I didn’t know what that meant. After that, I exhibited all over the world and that’s how the sales of my photos started.

AS: How did participating in Africa Remix at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and then at the Southbank Centre in London help your career?

SF: Africa Remix didn’t change my life because my work had already been exhibited a lot before. Since my work was discovered in 1994, I never stopped showing elsewhere. I’ve shown all over the world.

AS: What was the starting point for African Spirits?

SF: It follows on from my earlier Tati series and shows black identity. I want to pay homage to what these black people did. Because I am a black man and you are a white woman and today we are talking together. It’s grandeur for me. And some of these men sacrificed themselves for this. I made the series in black-and-white photography because I feel as if I am in my natural colours.

AS: Where were the photos made?

SF: I set up my studio here in the gallery. I put up the décor and hired the clothes. In Europe there are always people who keep old costumes.

AS: The photograph you’ve made of Mohamed Ali reinterprets the 1968 cover of Esquire magazine. Why did you choose this portrait of him?

SF: Even though he was alive, Mohamed Ali was dead in his heart because of the suffering of the black Americans. It reminds me of the segregation of black Americans. They suffered more than the Africans. Their ancestors were put in chains to go to America for centuries and centuries and centuries.

AS: Do you have a favourite image?

SF: The one of Nelson Mandela. In October 1980, I received my passport and I could go anywhere except South Africa. That was because of him, because he was in prison. I’ve never met him.

AS: Who else would you like to portray in your self-portraits?

SF: There are other people that I would like to include too, like Ghandi and Mao. I’m only one person but I facilitate things. I’m a defender of all of them; I communicate the past in the present.

AS: Have you ever portrayed your grandmother?

SF: No, but I think I will one day.

AS: I read that your neighbours in Bangui aren’t even aware of your status as a successful artist.

SF: My neighbours do not know me as a photographer, for my own security. In fact they think I’m doing magic! They don’t really understand the idea of being an artist-photographer. But it would be stupid to live in Europe. I have my life over there.

TEXT BY ANNA SANSOM
©image Samuel Fosso

Leo Rubinfien

Leo Rubinfien witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 from his own terrace in lower Manhattan. As traumatic as it was to experience the event so closely, it took many months for Rubinfien to formulate his response to the experience and years to develop this response into his book Wounded Cities (Steidl, 2008). The photographs come from more than 20 cities that have been struck by significant terror attacks in recent years. Eyemazing met with Rubinfien in San Francisco.

As an introduction to the project, Rubinfien explained:

Leo Rubinfien: I think in the United States we like to imagine that September 11 was unique, but events like it have really been going on all over the world for quite some time. I spent the months afterward walking, standing on street corners, looking at people around me and wondering, who are you…who are you? Do you fear what I fear? What do you want? Later, I began to photograph people as if the pictures might contain clues or answers to the questions I had. They couldn’t, of course, but the work still seemed to express the wish that they could. For Wounded Cities I visited places that had experienced terror back as far as the early 1990s, but there are no pictures of victims. Few of the pictures come from specific sites of violence. These are all ordinary people. Everyone is a potential victim but there’s no way to know more than that.

Heather Snider: In Wounded Cities you write about how you and your family were living very close to the World Trade Center on September 11. Can you describe your personal experience of that morning?

LR: I was close to what happened but I don’t want to suggest that that was exceptional. I was just nearby; it happened in my neighbourhood. Many people were much closer. One remarkable aspect of terror attacks is that you can be just a short distance away and see a horrible thing happening in front of your nose, yet still be safe. I was working at my desk when I heard the terrible noise of the first plane coming downtown over Tribeca. It was very low and moving very fast, making a roaring, shrieking sound. I went out and watched, thinking it must have a mechanical problem and that the pilot was trying to reach the harbour. Then, astonishingly, it went directly into the building before me. For a year afterward I was in despair and didn’t believe I could do anything with photography in response to what had happened. I didn’t think photographing the ruins, or the victims, would tell me anything.

HS: What were you doing in your photography just previous to this event and were you able to continue with it, or did everything change at that moment?

LR: I was working on a book that the attacks made me set aside, though now I’m ready to return to it. That book was based on my belief—not far from a feeling many people had in the 1990s—that we were in a new era in which the world was knitting itself together happily, prosperously, peacefully. But after September 11 all that seemed appallingly simple to me. The whole story of globalisation is far more mysterious and complicated and darker than I’d realised.

What we experienced in 2001 was a form of warfare, of course, and the unusual thing was that it had burst in on people who hadn’t thought they were at war. The sudden intrusion of war into the peace in which we were used to living was utterly shocking. It gave people a mental wound that was perhaps even more profound than the physical damage. It would drive our actions on every level—personal, political—and it would last a very long time. So the question for me was how to photograph when photographs only show surfaces, and can’t describe an inner wound. For a year I was stuck, but then, in 2002, I was in Tokyo when the first Bali bombings occurred. The people around me seemed to take them very hard. They’d had the Aum Shinrikyo attacks in the 1990s, and the Kuta Beach bombings brought the emotion of those days back in an instant. I began to see that everything you cannot tell, looking at a person, is no less interesting than what you think you can tell, and so I began to see how to do this book.

HS: This idea of culling the mood of a people, taken unaware from a public space is reminiscent of Walker Evans’ subway photographs…

LR: Evans, along with August Sander, is very important to me, but unlike the Evans subway subjects, most of the Wounded Cities people knew they were being photographed, and much of the emotion you see in them comes out of that.

HS: When you started this body of work, was your intention so clearly defined, that you would go to places that have experienced significant terrorist events, and then look for the impact, if any, in the faces of the population? Or did your theme emerge as you were working?

LR: I knew I’d go to cities that had been attacked, but the project grew deeper as I worked. The first picture I knew was strong was of a girl on the street in Japan (Tokyo, 2002, at Shibuya Station). There was a strangeness to the encounter—between me, between the viewer, and her. She is an interesting and odd-looking girl by herself, OK, but there was also her suspicion of the person looking at her, and that quality seemed to be expressed not only by her eyes but by her blanched face and uncanny orange hair and other things too, as if she’d been shocked into looking as she looked. When I saw this I thought yes, this has the “skewed-ness” of the world I’m in now and I could see the path I wanted to go down.

HS: And if this was your starting point, where was your ending point?

LR: In Palestinian Hebron, earlier this year, on the last of 15 or 20 trips I made for the project. Hebron has experienced freelance violence for 100 years. The most famous event was in 1994, when a Jewish doctor murdered many Muslim men who were praying in the shared mosque-synagogue at the core of the city. But smaller brutalities have taken place almost continually.

HS: How was working on this project different from other work you have done? There seems to be a moral passion behind this work…

LR: I was aware of something like that. The first thing I was, after the attacks, was furious: outraged that this could have been done, not just to my family, my city, but also to all those individuals. A person who detonates a bomb in a crowd makes people out to be representatives of an idea, not the unique, private beings that they are. This abstracting, this erasure of the individuality of people that was implicit in the attacks was unbearable to me. Wounded Cities says over and over again: look at this person. There’s a fierce insistence on the individuality of the people throughout it.

HS: You combine both black and white and colour in Wounded Cities, how did this dual approach unfold?

LR: For many years I’d photographed mostly in colour, but something about this subject made black and white more appropriate. Initially I thought the ratio would be 50/50, but as I progressed, the question was whether to keep the colour work at all, when 90 percent of the best pictures were in black and white. But in assembling the book I liked the way the colour disrupted the picture sequence. Just when you felt you knew what was happening, a colour picture would knock you out of that, and remind you how subjective the pictures, the writing, really were—that every picture represented just a way of seeing, a way of asking.

HS: There is a statement you made in the foreword of your previous book, A Map of the East, that your work might “be difficult for [the person] who looks for a picture’s stylistic response to whatever happened last year in the world of art.” Though I agree with you that this is true in your photography, your position is intriguing considering that you are not only an artist but also a well known writer and critic actively engaged in the art world. How do you keep these sides of yourself distinct, or do you?

LR: I’ve never written about the art world. Only about art, and only a little of it. I’m not a critic. I like writing about how pictures strike me. A real critic has an interest in how a given field is developing, but I’ve never been like that. I’ve tried to say what I was trying to understand about certain photographers, in the course of doing my work as one. All artists, whether they articulate it or not, are constantly in private dialogue with work by others, looking and thinking and figuring out why the object here touches them more than the one over there. I’ve simply tried to convey how that dialogue runs in my own mind.

HS: You were a friend and admirer of Garry Winogrand at an earlier time in your life. Do you wonder what he would think about the Wounded Cities?

LR: It would make me happy if he said “good job,” I suppose, but I don’t think about it. I’ve taken this project as far as I can. There not much more I can do, it’s done, it is what I lived through, or near enough, and there’s little there that could usefully be changed. There’s nothing phoney in it.

HS: In Wounded Cities you say that what the world has been caught up in recently is not war, but a state in which war and peace go on at the same time, and in which the peace blinds you to the extent of the violence that’s also going on. After spending so much time investigating this idea, and looking at the spirit of people in the street, do you see our world moving towards peace or war?

LR: I’m not a political analyst. I respond to the world too impressionistically to be one. So while there’s a lot about politics in the book, it’s always with the aim of discovering how large events strike upon the life of an ordinary person. The book’s subject is how phenomena like September 11 invade our private lives. I don’t want to speak of where we are going, or how we should behave, or what we should do—there are professionals who know more about that than I’ll ever know. I greatly admire the logical abilities of real analysts. I can only evoke what a few of the conundrums by which we are trapped feel like.

I’ve never been much of a political person and even less a political artist. The book is concerned with political events for how they bend the lives of individual people. In the end, they are what fascinate me. It is a real issue, though, for Americans, that for decades our government has committed warlike acts without our quite knowing it. On one hand, our officials often prefer not to talk about them; on the other, we haven’t wanted to know. We haven’t wanted the responsibility. And so our country has done much damage while turning its eyes away from its own hands. I’m not sure this is something we can safely continue to do. It seems difficult to sleep as we have in the past.

TEXT BY HEATHER SNIDER
©image Leo Rubinfien

Rahi Rezvani

An Iranian-born, Amsterdam-based photographer, is a gifted storyteller. In Retreat to Nowhere, a rich, smoky series of cinematic photographs set to elegiac music, Rezvani combines his talents as com­poser, photographer, and filmmaker to bring us the story of Linda, a woman who lost everything because of war. Rezvani, who worked as a graphic designer in Teheran and a photographer in The Hague, is no stranger to war. Here, through the story of Linda, Rezvani invites the viewer to travel through her life and remember that the losses of war far outdate the fighting. He gives Linda a voice because, as he says at the end of the interview, “People need to talk, don’t they?” EYEMAZING catches up with Rezvani about his project.

Clayton Maxwell: To view Retreat to Nowhere, I listened to the music on your website and scrolled through the images several times. The story of Linda become increasingly moving the longer I delved into it. I love how the images tell Linda’s full life story, and really connect with how the suffering and loneliness towards the end of her life are so intimately tied to the losses she suffered as a young girl. Why do you think it’s important to tell her full life story?

Rahi Rezvani: I’m against war. During Linda’s life she experiencedwar twice, plus she lost her lover during the Dutch/Indonesian war that happened between the two world wars. Many years later she lost her child, because of her life during these wars. Her life story is about surviving. How much sadness can a person handle in their life?

CM: Did you make this series as a way to awaken compassion and respect for people you might otherwise write-off or disregard?

RR: Yes, I believe that our generation often has no idea of the freedom we live in. When you look at the miserable people we sometimes meet in the street and you see their defencelessness, I feel this tragedy should be told to learn from and to treat these people with more respect.

CM: This series made me consider more fully the lasting heartache of war and how families continue to suffer long after the fighting is over. My grandmother lost her husband in WWII: she said that when she visited the WWII cemetery at Normandy, instead of thinking about all the dead soldiers, she thought about all of the widows left to fend for themselves.
How did you become interested in a story like Linda’s? Have you or anyone you know had a more difficult path because of war?

RR: When I was a child I saw war through my own eyes, between Iran and Iraq for eight years. There are so many people like Linda with the same destiny in life. Linda’s story is not just a story. It is still going on and for her it is impossible to step out of her misery.

CM: Could you please explain to me the multi-media concept behind Retreat to Nowhere? You say it is the first time that a film is in a book and an exhibition, could you elaborate? Could you please tell me how the project would be experienced in an exhibition space?

RR: In the exhibition, the book is viewed in a completely dark surrounding with a spotlight on the book. The space is filled with the soundtrack. There is nothing that takes your attention away from the photos. It becomes a film in a book.
The flashback technique that is used in film is now used for photography. The soundtracks I composed over the images give people the feeling that they are watching a movie. A lot of people asked me during the exhibitions whether the images were collected and put together as a book. All of the images were created. Costumes, styling, make-up, models, etc. were chosen for each photo.
During the exhibition, people – especially older people – reacted sometimes very emotionally. Others went through the big books, over and over again, or came back to show it to others.

CM: Please tell me more about the music and the relationship it has with your images. Do you create them together or are they independent?

RR: I created them both together. When an image was finished, I put it by beamer [projector] on the wall for a few days and composed the music. Sometimes I used sound effects from the situation in the picture. (For example, in the shot where Linda is dancing on the table, I used background sounds from people enjoying themselves in a bar.)
CM: The photo of Linda as an orphaned girl, huddling in her bed alone is heartbreaking and very beautiful. It shows such pathos for the fragility of an innocent child. Is photographing children very different from photographing adults?

RR: This is an interesting question. Let me first explain the meaning of the two pages.
Linda told me that the nuns punished her when she could or did not read the bible. Children had to sleep on the floor of the kitchen as a punishment. In this image, you see her lying on the floor with the bible open and curtains that are blown by the wind. Meaning the window is open and you can see the moon. The moon stands for loneliness.

There is no specific difference in photographing grown-ups or children. I spent a lot of time talking to the girl in the photographs and explaining Linda’s destiny. She understood well. She got my feeling and she responded this way. The moon is not a picture – it is painted.

CM: Your images have such a smoky and film noir quality. Why are you drawn to that aesthetic?

RR: These images are a flashback and I believe that “unsharp and noisy” images are closer to the images in your memory. It also gives a cinematic feel to the images.

CM: For me, one of the hardest parts about the story is the fact that the son abandons Linda. Her other relationships – with her parents and with her lover – dissolved because of war and death. But this is some one who chose to leave her. Why isn’t her son more compassionate about her past?

RR: The only answer I got from Linda is that she was confronted with Linda’s past and people called her a prostitute. He could not handle that. I don’t know exactly what happened between them.

CM: The image of Linda’s lover getting shot in the war is powerful. It reminds me a bit of Robert Capa’s famous image, The Fallen Soldier, from the Spanish Civil War. This action image must have been a challenge to stage. Could you tell me more about how you created it? Where was it shot?

RR: The story was that Linda’s lover was shot first in his knee so he could not run away and the second shot was in his neck. For me, it was more interesting to get the right feeling of the moment when he is asking the Indonesian soldier, “Please, don’t.” His raised hand shows this. We spent hours and hours on how to get the expression right in his eyes, mouth, feet and hand. The helmet had to be perfectly right after he is shot in the neck. The image was shot in a place in my neighbourhood. I used an Indonesian model; Linda’s lover is a friend I play football with.

The point of this book is that it is a mixture of techniques. Some of the shots are paintings, some are shot in a reportage way, some are made with a documentary approach. In the end it is all about telling Linda’s story.

CM: Tell me about the photo of the open armoire in the empty room. What part does it play in telling this story?

RR: For a lot of people it is a normal picture. Each person has his own armoire inside. Often it is old or broke. The door is open, because Linda’s story is ongoing. In her bedroom there is the picture of mother and son on the wall, meaning they are still living there together. The doll, from her childhood, lies on top of the armoire. In the picture where Linda’s son attacks her, you can see the armoire is open and Linda’s hand is reaching inside the armoire. This refers to her life story.
There is an old Persian saying that some people have an armoire inside of them and that they save everything in this armoire. Some people die without opening their armoire, some people are brave enough to open it.

CM: The final photograph of a large bottom on a bar stool with a walking cane near by is very poignant and one of my favourite in the series. It says so much about aging and the anonymity or invisibility many older people must experience. Why did you choose this as the final image?

RR: It is the end of the story up till now, meaning today. It is the only photo with a documentary character. Linda had one place to go to, she worked there for free and it helped her to solve part of her loneliness. But the bar closed, and Linda is now without a job and is more miserable and lonely then ever.

CM: How long have you been working on this project? Given the tragic subject matter, was it an emotionally difficult project for you?

RR: Technically I worked on Retreat to Nowhere for six months. It was not difficult to understand Linda’s story, but to translate her story into images has taken a long time and a lot of energy. But the project was really the result of ten years working and studying as a graphic designer in Teheran and as a photographer in The Hague.

CM: Can you tell me about your background as a photographer? How did you get into it? Who and what inspires you to take photos?

RR: When I was 15 I was an assistant of a set designer in Iranian cinema. One day the photographer, who was supposed to make cinematic photos, did not show up. They asked me to make the pictures. It was my very first photo shoot. I had success and suddenly had a job as a photographer. I do love painting and graphic design. Both are very connected for me and that is why I studied both of them in the East. Than I came to the West and found it interesting to understand the culture of the West through art. Photography became the next study. Photography is my sickness. I talk through my images. People need to talk, don’t they?

Text by Clayton Maxwell

© picture: Rahi Rezvani

Alison Jackson

It jars our sense of reality to see the Queen having a good read on the toilet, her panties pulled down below her knees; Yet the ‘suspected’ imaginary realm containing these and many other examples of celebrity photography is far from imaginary. In fact, it’s excruciatingly real judging on the basis of everything that goes into making it seem real. Alison Jackson’s photography creates a world of simulations. Her jaw-dropping images hurl mental darts at celebrities and capture their everydayness, neuroses, and simplest of bodily needs. At the same, however, her images turn celebrities into the carriers and perpetrators of a false reality.
Jackson’s photographic artistry is crowned by the fact that she creates every aspect of these images herself, and achieves staggering creative results without resorting to special effects or alterations. Despite their appearing real or authentic, the compromised celebrities depicted in her photographs are never the real McCoy but rather ‘spitting images’ or lookalikes found through agencies around the world, and the voyeuristic situations that Jackson implants them in – settings which seem hijacked from reality by paparazzi cameras – serve as carefully contrived backdrops for ‘photographed performances’.
This is photography which does more than copy a staged-alias-false reality, this is bound up in our inherent greedy voyeurism, and in our need to create a folk religion.

A graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, Jackson’s work first caught the attention of a large audience with her 1999 visual simulation of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed with their supposed mixed-race child. Since then the recipient of a BAFTA and several other awards, Jackson continues to astonish viewers in Europe and abroad with her creations.

Karl Johnson: While you were at the Royal College of Art in London, what made you change from studying sculpture to studying photography?

Alison Jackson: Well, I made performances then. They were live performances which involved real people. Soon I realized that there was a greater interest in seeing my photographs of these performances. Basically nothing was left after the performances were over. Only the photographs, which documented what had already happened. In the performances, different people did different things, but I obviously couldn’t freeze them in place. So I had to photograph them. And I came to concentrate on photography.

K.J.: How did that lead up to making celebrity photography?

A.J.: That was something which evolved from the work I was doing. I was studying the importance of the image: how important the image is over, say, the
real thing, and how we live our lives in a virtual world. Also, I was studying religious iconography and the fact that we only know the story of Christ through images. Of course, the crucifix is the biggest icon of all time! So I focused on trying to change people’s preconceptions about it. I experimented with the crucifix by attaching different things to it. I put, for example, a woman on the cross and tried lots of other subject matter, always using photography. Later, in performances, I would work with real things: a real woman, a real cross, and so on. Then I tried to see and make visible what the differences were. Interestingly enough, the viewers preferred to look at the photographs over the performance. An object is a lot easier to deal with, isn’t it?

K.J.: That description makes me think of Gilbert & George for some reason.

A.J.: Yes. I was fascinated by the work of Gilbert & George. In their performances they remained perfectly still and fixed in time as if standing in photographs.
With me, what mattered most was making photographs look more like live performances, making live performances look more like photographs, and then
to study the difference. I did that with a version of The Last Supper. I placed an installation of The Last Supper with real people at one end of a space, and a photograph of The Last Supper at the other. And while I tried to make the photograph look like the real thing, I tried to make the real thing look like the
photograph. I don’t know how successful that was. But it’s always interesting to see how viewers become seduced by photography.
Around that time, Princess Diana died and England came to a bit of a standstill. It wasn’t long before I saw this amazing phenomenon: nobody really knew Princess Diana except through the media photography which created her in their minds. Then I thought: If I use a lookalike of Princess Diana in a photograph, will people really know or even care that it’s not her? And I exhibited an image in the public mind, a family shot of Diana and Dodi and their mixed-race child. This quickly led to sensational speculations connected to her relationship with Dodi, and to her being, perhaps, murdered because of her pregnancy and the child. It was an iconic photograph, the sort of photo- graph that could have been taken by Snowdon. A Christ-like figure is in the center, and the strong, triangular composition of the picture makes it a very tradition work of photography, which displays the classic Madonna and child situation. Which this is not! It’s Diana and Dodi with their mixed-race baby.
All the expected references to Diana being sacred and idolized were there, though, everything an invention of the press and media. That fascinated me. How we all bought something invented by media imagery and materials. I was still at the Royal College of Art when I showed the Princess Diana photograph. But it was so scandalizing, so socially traumatizing, that I grew frightened. I felt as if I had to make other photographs right away in order to somehow disguise this one. That was when I began to make photographs about the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky Affair, about the Royal Family, and about other well-known personalities in England. As my body of work grew, I began to make images of American and global celebrities.

K.J.: Would you say that today’s media puts more stock in presentation than it does in the truth, and that this, too, makes photography like yours so powerful – since most viewers don’t really want the truth as much as they do the presentation of ‘any’ truth?

A.J.: Perhaps. But in the case of the media, the truth is only a partial truth, isn’t it? The political arena makes it easy for politicians to lie on TV. They come in with a prepared script, say their bit, and then remove themselves without being scrutinized. All politicians are semi-actors!

K.J.: We know how most celebrities are ‘made’ to look. But, visually speaking, what are you trying to reach in your images of celebrities? How should the
image look?
A.J.: Even if it doesn’t seem obvious at first glance, I’m interested in the construction of iconic photography. Also, I respect classical imagery and the so-called three-quarter-view approach. The great portrait photography, for example, like Testino’s Princess Diana, and the classic images of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. These are all very famous portraits, and all made in a similar way: always shot from below the head and nearly full on, showing a three quarter view, and always elongating the figures noses, depicting them in that Romanesque or Greek sculpture sort of way. Also, in each case, you see a brilliance behind the figure, and this leads your eye beyond the threequarter portrait and into the background. For me, this is an aspect of iconic photography. An exception might be Cecil Beaton, who often had a window nearby or behind the subject. I also think that, geometrically speaking, the construction of an iconic photograph clearly duplicates the geometry of a crucifix. Whether you’re religious or not, there is something beguiling about the image of Christ on the cross, and about the shape that it creates. When I study a face and register the horizontal bar of the eyes being intersected by the verticality of the nose right down to the neck, I imagine a geometric shape. Whether we notice it not, the picture’s composition is what lodges it in the mind and memory. Even tabloid
culture knows about all this. It understands the value of a good composition, and it uses it, too. That’s how you get this type of iconic photography in even cheap
magazines. It has a real purpose: to make celebrities desirable. So you have unexpected ‘compositional’ sophistication on the one hand, and a low perspective on the other.

K.J.: Are you ever disturbed by the godlike status that viewers give celebrities when they idolize them in photographs?

A.J.: Not at all. These images are beguiling for viewers! Which is precisely what I study in my work: the seductiveness of photography, the very nature of photography. For me, that includes the media and TV. It’s all very beguiling. Some people switch on the TV to get to sleep, because you don’t have to think; and we all know that TV cocoons you in a false sense of security. Other people leave their TV running for their cats and dogs. The images do it! Or look at the
celebrity and fashion magazine business. There are no words at all. It’s just picture after picture, and that makes people happy. We look at pictures all the time. The more we see certain celebrities, the more attractive and desirable they
become for us. Constantly seeing them turns them into saints, actually. You end up having saints of sex, saints of money, saints of ambition and so on. Each
celebrity comes to represent something in particular. Having so many saints spread around suits our culture rather well, I think. It’s certainly a lot better than having just ‘one’ Jesus. Not that the English go to church, mind you! That’s what all the celebrity magazines and tabloids are for. With celebrity magazines they practice their ‘folk religion’. Still, we live in a culture where real celebrities may or may not even exist. The celebrity is born of images, and the celebrity only
exists in images. You never really reach the celebrity. Wherever it involves this ‘folk religion’ of craving the celebrity, it’s always the same thing: What you can’t
get, you want more of.  Basically, I think that it doesn’t make a bit of difference
whether the image is of the real celebrity or not. I don’t really think most people care. Just the same, the phenomenon is really uncanny. I invited my Princess Diana lookalike along to a friend’s gettogether for a drink one evening, and one of the other guests just stood in front of her perfectly tongue-tied and star-struck, unable to speak or behave properly. When I was in Madrid, there was a
similar incident. A crowd of people gathered around the David Beckham lookalike. Many of them were trying to kiss him, and they just wouldn’t take no for an answer until I showed them his passport. I had to prove to them, on paper, that he wasn’t the ‘real’ David Beckham.

K.J.: How long does it take you to find the perfect lookalike and then plan and produce a photograph?

A.J.: That depends. But it’s time consuming. It involves an enormous amount of work, and sometimes the photograph just can’t be made at all. I’m constantly looking for the right people, constantly chasing after possible lookalikes, constantly going up to perfect strangers on buses, in restaurants, and on planes – and constantly being rebuffed, tool! For locating lookalikes I work with casting agencies all over the world. In addition, I have an amazingly gifted casting director. Wigs are created for our actors. We make several light tests. It’s not just about lookalike photography. I’m not terribly interested in the lookalikes or celebrities. The real work is to construct a completely false reality.

K.J.: Do you think the obsession with celebrities and celebrity culture is more intense in the United States than it is in Europe?

A.J.: I don’t know for sure if the difference is so big.
What I think, though, is that things have changed in the States. Celebrities are, of course, extremely important. Even today Marilyn Monroe has the status
of a goddess. The difference is that over the last six years the States have discovered the tabloid culture that Britain always had. So now you have hundreds of new magazines. What’s interesting is that now the market embraces the fad of anti-celebrities. It zeroes in on a different angle. Suddenly you see, for
instance, Angelina Jolie on the front pages of newspapers looking old and wrinkled, and you read a lot of speculative reports on the lives of celebrities.

TEXT BY KARL E. JOHNSON
© picture: Alison Jackson

Well-known individuals depicted in this article are not “real”.
The photographs have been created using look-alikes.
The well-known individuals have not had any involvement in the
creation of the photographs and they have not approved them, nor has
their approval been sought for the publication of these photographs.

Image caption:
© Alison Jackson, Queen on the loo, 2003

Antoine Agoudjian

Fire eyes

Nowhere better than in Antoine Agoudjian’s images do we sense the ambiguity of a familiar term, which can be so deceiving. Not one of his photographs fails to show, with beauty and justice, the efficacy of a long-term irruption, tender or brutal, at the heart of a specific moment. Or rather, in each case, the strength of each image comes from the meeting of the immediacy of the scene he has shot with the long-term situation of which it speaks so loudly. It is indeed the source of an unequalled seduction.

This fragile and knowledgeable equilibrium could perhaps be considered to be embodied, metaphorically, by the person in traditional costume who is balanced on the high-wire in front of the immutable church in the background.

The artist doesn't try to hide his obstinate search for memory; he refuses to show any gratuitousness in the images. The impact of the Armenian martyrdom is engrossing, in the omnipresence of mourning between the barbarity of men and the violence of the quaking earth. The palette of flattened blacks, sudden spots of white, greys, and the mastery of shading—all this gives full intensity to the humanity of faces marked by trials which have furrowed the old and brought the ingenuousness of the young to the fore.

No trace here of didacticism; but the rare talent of offering our eyes and minds the indelible trace of a tortured past—a past which nevertheless opens a path toward a peace dreamed of in the fields, the ocean and the pavement. Thus these people, martyred by History, come to us according to the artist’s intention. Without hiding anything, he has chosen to illuminate us and thus speak to us of what things the future will perhaps preserve from the fatalities of perpetual suffering. And we are grateful to him for that light.

TEXT BY JEAN-NOËL JEANNENEY

©picture Antoine Agoudjian, Sevkiyat , Armenia, city of Yerevan. 1st commemoration of the massacres in Sumgait. Picture taken in 1989

Jerry Spagnoli

American Dreaming

I started this project towards the end of 1990. The build up to Gulf War One provoked it. I‘d been working out some of my ideas about documentary photography for a while and that all coincided with this substantial shift in US foreign policy. Not being a professional photojournalist I didn’t have access to places and personalities at the centre of events so I simply lived the day-to-day life of a civilian and photographed the things I saw around me. The process was largely intuitive. I’d go to events or to particular parts of the city where I’d be likely to find something that would make an interesting photograph but beyond that the process was one of reflex and discovery.

What fascinates me about photography is its ability to extract and organise apparent meaning out of the chaos of the world around us. This feature is particularly striking when out and about on the city streets. It’s an intense environment. Your mind and body are bombarded by sensations, much more than you could possibly absorb and process, so your brain is always automatically deciding what to pay attention to and what to ignore. This is a biological adaptation from the earliest days of our species and is essential to our survival. Without this ability we’d be distracted to death. It’s a system for tailoring the world to the limits of your comprehension. Its primary function, in this case, is to assist you in navigating physically down the street but what is also going on is more complicated.

Because of the way our minds work, situations and things have meanings for us and we tend to notice what we are predisposed to see. Some days you’ll notice people with bandages on some part of their body, other days you’ll keep noticing people carrying guitars. There’s no more than the usual number of such things on any given day but somewhere in your mind you are thinking about it and so you notice. When you photograph on the street this mechanism becomes the basis for building a collection of images.

You go out without any specific intentions; you photograph whatever crosses your path; you exercise no control over the subject except where you choose to stand and when to trip the shutter, and after months of shooting you end up with a coherent body of work. It seems to me that the camera provides you with a way of externalising your thoughts, your brain’s highly selective focus provokes your impulse to press the shutter. You notice the things that feed into what you are thinking about, whether you are aware of it or not.

I had been using this approach to for a number of years and had become fairly good at it but in the end I found that the images lacked the emphatic communication with the viewer that I was after. The images were too diffuse and there were too many irrelevant distractions in the frame. In other words, they looked too much like the world. I felt that I needed to break them free from that constraint so I decided to work on a series of images from which I would present only small portions of the scenes I photographed.

This idea had come to me from some books I had been looking at which featured details from important paintings. The authors would focus in on a small section; a gesture, something hanging on the wall, or in the distant landscape, and explain what it meant. This way of reading images was very compelling to me. It suggested that a rhetorical system could be developed to create a form of open-ended story telling. When I began working on the street I focused on the specific small details that I felt had the most potential for meaning when separated from their context. I hoped that this would allow them to operate freely in the mind of the viewer as a provocation to their own internal storyteller. These images could then be arranged and sequenced in such a way that a new context could be created by their interrelationship. This would allow me a certain amount of narrative control while still allowing the audience the experience of deciphering the meaning.

These photographs are all, technically, documentary photographs. I didn’t pose or arrange anything. I went out, I looked around and I photographed what I thought were interesting subjects without any intervention. When it came time to make prints I selected all the images that I thought worked well as compositions. It was all very straightforward and fairly neutral but in the end the results were very idiosyncratic. Originally I considered displaying the images in random sequences, or allowing the viewers to rearrange them on a gallery wall but then I decided that they needed to be presented in a book. I had faith that no matter how vigorously I sequenced them there was still plenty of space available for the audience to work out their own ideas.

The subversion of the objective report of the photograph is an important aspect of my work. This series is basically a project of fragmentation and reconstitution. The formal aspects of the images reinforce this. I shot it all on 35mm film with an ASA of 3200 and then I used only a 1/8 - 1/4 inch portion of the negative for the final image. The resulting graininess emphasises the surface of the film and breaks down the transparency of the representation. The image is not a direct seamless report of the subject, it is overtly mediated.

This grainy look is also intended to suggest a state where the world of appearances is reduced to an articulated surface, animated from behind by a field of energy. It’s as if what we see is really just a scrim onto which natural forces are projected from behind and that scrim keeps you from getting too close to the origins of those forces. The world (as depicted at the film plane) is (metaphorically) the interface between your mind and the energies beneath that grainy surface.

TEXT BY JERRY SPAGNOLI
©pictures Jerry Spagnoli
American Dreaming,  published by Steidl
ISBN 978-3-86930-307-9

Jeffrey Silverthorne

“We built Disneyland, you didn’t.” —Jeffrey Silverthorne

In Philippe Soupault’s Surrealist classic Last Nights of Paris, the character’s main protagonist and flaneur of nocturnal Paris promotes his obsession with the book’s female lead Georgette in a passage about her transcendent ephemeral passing as such…
“…Georgette was seductive only because her appearance was obviously deceptive. Behind the everyday veil, under her make-up, one could discern her real flesh and could, so to speak, breathe her proper perfume, her very essence. But what gave her person a charm that could be described as special was her resemblance to a shadow.”

Soupault’s reduction of Georgette as “her resemblance to a shadow”, loosely frames my attempt to make analogous and to define the newest body of work by Jeffrey Silverthorne. And as analogy to the French literary tradition, the aim is the lyrical dissemination of an ephemeral notion of slippage and loss that consumes the latter half of America’s 20th century and early 21st century’s dilemma of decline. Presently, the veil of an opulent dream is torn asunder by the beast of economy and the country’s complicit desire to deny the importance of the psychological ramifications of photography and the subsequent paving over of every brick left to build every house in the disillusioned and flailing ideology of the “American Dream”.

Jeffrey Silverthorne’s new body of work A Diary of Lost Originals is receiving some well-deserved recognition, which was not determined previously and still does not exist with heavy measure in the United States. Note that it is Musee Niepce, not a museum in the US that is giving Jeffrey his first retrospective with museum operator Francois Cheval rightly declaring that Jeffrey’s work had been an important part of the history of French photography and within the photographic world over the past decade. It is this function of Silverthorne’s place in the larger peripheries of photography that has bolstered his new precedent within the European scene. Europeans have a perhaps stereotypically nonchalant approach to matters of sex, death, and those violent displays, which are subsequently rendered virile in the face of so much American loss. It is possibly a stereotypically American surrender to the pan-psychological nuances from the 60s onward.

Silverthorne, a prophet of awareness, contends that his work is not focused on the above qualities of life and death exclusively, but rather passes as commentator on the turbulence he sees daily within the diffused membrane of the dream. These are the images of the unravelling, the unconscious, and the uncollected totems of real lives falling through widening cracks in the splitting pavement. A slough of recesses under which new light must shine through to document the underexposed relics of the promise given in the land of the free.

Starting in the 1960s under the heavy-weight tutelage of Harry Callahan and Rhode Island School of Design, Silverthorne’s trajectory has included the parallel loci of abjection and also beauty staged in predominantly theatrical tableaus. Known predominantly for his “morgue work” in the 1970’s, Silverthorne’s transgressive interests also embed themselves in The Missing and also the hinterland series of transvestite prostitutes in Boystown, which open up the chasm of divinity, death, and the (un) observed within the canon of photography. Though citing references such as Giotto, Kertesz, and Goya, I find the master’s brush more suited to Brueghel or perhaps Bosch. In every facet of Silverthorne’s work, there lies an utterance about the frailty of human life, emotion, and in particular, a desire to cope within the post-consumer world and decline of America’s greater majority.

In reflecting on the manner of loss and slippage in the new work via the coupling of negative and doubling of exposure (both pursuits are used) Silverthorne remarks that…

“I think that there is an American read to these. There is a directness to many of the images, both as I buy them and as I use them. There is a subtlety to them as well, which comes about with general cultural associations of the viewer, and having the resulting combination photograph upset those general associations. There is less stability of psychology to these and that mirrors the lack of community stability, and the various technologies, which we take for granted as means of communication. We are, almost, nowhere because we are so many other places than where we physically are. This being nowhere is in no way related to deep spiritual experiences. I think that many of my images are motivated by loss, emptiness, and the desire to make a presentation to somehow shake the world and say, "I too am alive." How deeply one wants to be alive is what one does in, with, their life.”

And on the combinative process of exposures and slippage…“This ‘slippage’ is actually a gain of traction that deepens each of the situations that formed the original negatives and the new one that is coming out in the picture I make. The accepted ‘normal’ use of time in a photograph only is paid attention to over many years if it does step out of the moment, transcend the moment, and reveal/mirror on-going curiosities/concerns. So the whole sense of linear time really falls apart, never existed, as an image worms its way into the imagination…actually the image already is in the imagination and the photographer simply reveals it. The images that are highly designed and constructed seldom last. As for the ‘pure aesthetics of the images blending(ed) together’, I understand, but that is no longer of interest to me. That is similar to making a photograph that looks like a photograph and calling it good. If there is not a social hit, if the image does not eat at my heart, then it's just decoration and that for me is worthless.”

The slippage involved in using several images, shot in different times becomes a sort of mantra, a knowing disposition that suggests the maker is aware of these concerns of time versus time. They are somehow wrought with imbalance in one photographic image. Slicing, editing, and marauding through the vast dystopia of American female cheesecake kitsch and that of images from early male adolescent dreams of female cheesecake, the images compacted together offer a vertiginous look at the American psyche and also that of Silverthorne. The works are somehow loosely autobiographical. (The viewer is never certain if these works are autobiographical, again adding to “slippage” of biography). During Silverthorne’s lifetime, the photographer has seen an age explained by the meanderings of rockets, of wars, of presidential men. Sandwiched between are the realms of corporal fascination with (concepts associated with) the female body, the age of progress, but also that of maternal and societal loss and a feel that the local newspaper boy has stolen somebody’s Playboy subscription only to run down to the train yard to show his friends the real secrets of what lies beneath everything directly before backing, sliding, slipping onto the tracks of an oncoming train.

The relativism of the situation and the images themselves bear a certain Stand by Me bittersweet and forced naivety, which is also faced with the colossal wall of death, which pursues many of our libidinal moments. Fascination is found leading way unto a certain cognitive blindness that gets lost in the ointment of times criss-crossing into a new morphology of mistrust of society, death, and perhaps the paternal pre-determined ignorance of the “feminine mystique”. This sentiment is not altogether different from chasing a prostitute. On this Silverthorne suggests that “the prostitute in my work is that undeserved satisfaction that exceeds expectation” under the black cloak of a Parisian night, leaving her resemblance to that of a shadow. The shadow, a metaphor for the spaces, which occur between the moments that Silverthorne has spliced together like a genetic manipulator of fevered dreams and moments never served, but moments created rather with aplomb. These Liminal spaces are doubled and put into one image that portends to contradict and also enable our understanding of American culture, the jetpacks we were promised, and the harsh reality of what we as Americans are about to be served in a major shift away from the might of our crumbling manifest destiny.

The process of which gives way to fissure. These images measure a cracking puff of ash and debris radiating up between the cracks in the sidewalk at our feet. Stumbling from a run into a free-fall. The images though eroticized, bear comment to the uncanny and the fumbling receptor of the beast of dreams.

Silverthorne’s (A Diary of Lost Originals) is sort of a Lewis Mumford dispassionately setting about to make the new city or social landscape from our collective psyche rather than an absolute record of it. It is a memoir of the lucid, personal, and a diaristic attitude to the tradition of the body and also the perception of hinterlands within the frame. It encapsulates, and its inability to shed the membrane that holds several components together firms our suspicions as player in the law of psychological averages and former societal displacement within the creaking passage of the false collectivisation of the American Dream. Here within the moment, we are amidst the unending scaffolding of Disneyland’s slowly materialising record of fissure and decay.-(Text by Brad Feuerhelm)

©All pictures Jeffrey Silverthorne,
Courtesy: VU’ galerie, Paris